The Circle Before the Commitment

March eighth. The brochure was just sitting there on the break room counter, between the communal sugar and someone's forgotten highlighter, like it had been placed there specifically for me to overthink. Spring session. Community center. The cover had a photograph of a woman doing something with her hands that I couldn't quite identify, pottery, maybe, or bread, or some kind of therapeutic clay situation, and I picked it up without deciding to.

I turned to the middle pages and found one class that made me stop. I don't know why it stopped me specifically. It was the kind of thing where you read the three-sentence description twice and the second time you're already calculating the days of the week and whether they conflict with anything, which is how you know you've already decided something even though you haven't said it out loud yet. I took my pen out of my back pocket and made a small circle around it. Then I took a photograph of the page with my phone, which is objectively not a thing a person needs to do when they have the physical brochure in their hand, but here we are.

the half-question, the half-answer

Simone came in while I was doing this. She watched me photograph a paper brochure that I was actively holding. She said nothing. She picked up her mug, looked at the brochure, and then at me, with the specific expression she has that reads as skeptical until you realize it's actually closer to fond. I said, I'm going to look into this one, and pointed at the circle. She said, okay, in the tone of someone who already knew that. We went back to work. I still have the brochure. It's in my bag. I haven't looked up registration yet but I've thought about it approximately six times since I got home, which feels like sufficient evidence that I'm going to.